I was holding off on this post until a few things had passed but this is a really important one, its actually vital to how the hosting industry ‘pans’ out within the telco / carrier market – the hosting industry has quite literally gone ‘pete tong’ since the BPOS drive against partners.

The market is full of technical ‘diatribe’ – everything is about the Cloud in the IT industry. The reality is that it has been going on for years in various shapes or forms.

This post is specifically discussing the Telco’s / the Network operators – BT, Vodafone, O2, Verizon, AT&T. In this respect the definition for these guys is around hosted software services – whether they deliver through their datacentres or those of a partner is a different matter.

The big play at this level is now around Unified Communications – another buzz word where the technology and innovation have been around for quite some time – at least 10 years, well that’s when I was working on it in Siemens. Clearly the technology has got smarter, the internet more pervasive and we are more connected as people – but the innovators were in the background far ahead of the commercial mainstream which exists today.

It’s only now that the market is being squeezed, the telco’s have to make data a commercially viable proposition on their networks just like voice which is still the main cash cow. They have to bring together their acquisitions – mobile, broadband, fixed using one thing alone – the ‘voice’ which is software which comes in many different flavors. I took exactly the same propositions to many of the big players back in 2004/5 – they just did not get it then and fail to really understand the hosting game now – they are being led by the software vendors who have their own agendas and their own very public battles.

I hold a great deal of passion for a couple of key players in the hosting industry – Ensim, Paralells and more recently EMS Cortex and I want to see them succeed, grow and take their places in the hall of fame. Let me tell you why – choice. In simple terms they give you as the telco the choice to provision what ever services your customer wants.

Let’s put some perspective around them – that control panel you used to manage your website on your webhosts server 10 years ago – 99% chance it was either Ensim or Paralells.

Your Hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Microsoft CRM panel – either as a reseller or ‘branded’ to look like the company you take your services from – you guessed it, one of the 3 above in general. Go type in Hosted Exchange into Google – they are all powered by one of these three in the main.

In simple terms whether you are a hosting company or a business, the plethora of applications is complex. This presents huge challenges at many different levels – I know having been there and figured this out.

As a telco you need ONE system to manage the provisioning, support and billing for all the new software services you are going to take to market. Look at your own business and how you run it now. So, if you use a provisioning solution from one of the large vendors be it Microsoft or Google you are going down a dead end and will seriously limit the value you can take to your customers and your shareholders.

Put it simply – O2 for the sake of argument has thousands of BlackBerry, Iphone customers in both small and large businesses – if you offer a pure microsoft strategy using their provisioning systems can you ever offer value to those customers without ‘lifting’ in some Microsoft services – NO. Those same customers make use Cisco or Avaya services – likewise you are locked out.

However, if you use one of the providers outlined you can go around ‘slicing and dicing’ different propositions, based on different technologies and offer the value that the customer really wants – all with one system to provision and support all hosted services.

Think about it.

Let the operators and telco’s deliver a store front of really good enterprise applications irrespective of software vendor – no one vendor makes the best messaging, telephone, CRM, mobile software – Ensim, Paralalls and EMS really do make this possible.

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